


Nightmares

by icewhisper



Series: Holiday Cheer & Tears [8]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 09:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16910352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: Len had never slept well alone. For as finicky as he was about touch – draped over Mick one second and flinching away from him the next – he’d always slept better with someone else. He settled down, constant fidgeting smoothed out to something that actually looked like rest. The lines in his face looked less severe. The furrow between his brows.





	Nightmares

****

Len had never slept well alone. For as finicky as he was about touch – draped over Mick one second and flinching away from him the next – he’d always slept better with someone else. He settled down, constant fidgeting smoothed out to something that actually looked like rest. The lines in his face looked less severe. The furrow between his brows.

He never slept _much_ , ever the insomniac. To bed late and up early and Mick was never quite sure if it was because of his own demons or because of that damn internal clock. It didn’t matter. Len moved. He functioned like a somewhat normal human being (if you ignored the unnatural amount of puns). Mick figured some people were just good at operating with three or four hours of sleep. Unless it became a problem, they didn’t need to talk about it.

And it didn’t.

But Mick did.

Chronos came into his head like an intruder, so much like a different person and so much like him at the same time. It _was_ him, he always had to remind himself. His anger. His actions. He’d never been a good guy and Chronos did nothing but hammer that fact home with dead bodies, threats, and icy flesh scattered across a metal floor.

It shook him awake at night, heart hammering even when he was still in his cell and only half-Mick, but when the Pilgrim came and he faced himself… He knew his choices, knew who he’d been then and who he’d been before the Time Masters found him, but he’d still been trying to figure out who he was in the wake of it all. Len was sleeping in the second bedroom, the one Rip thought was his and that they’d really only been using for storage. Neither of them were wearing their rings.

Len still rubbed at the spot where his skin met Gideon’s regenerated skin like the meeting point hurt.

They didn’t talk about it.

Mick didn’t tell Len about the nightmares. About the memories that haunted him, because lifetimes with the Time Masters had begun to mesh with darker memories of before. After Savage was dead, he told himself every time he wondered if it was time to tell Len what was going on. After Savage was dead and they’d gone home. They’d get some drinks and talk, because they were too dysfunctional to talk about feelings without fists or booze, and he could go back to his shrink.

Then, Len died and there was no one to tell anymore.

He couldn’t talk to the team as the mission that was supposed to end continued and they began to act like Len had never existed at all.

He couldn’t talk to Lisa when they couldn’t look at each other without thinking about who they’d lost.

He never did go back to his shrink. The mission took over and the nightmares kept coming. They grew. They shifted. New people slipped through now and again, but the Time Masters were always there. Chronos was always there. Len was always there.

He stopped sleeping in his bed and moved to the bench press. It was easier that way, he told himself every night when he startled awake and curled his fingers around the weights instead of trying to go back to sleep. Len would have called it more efficient.

It was a lie.

Len would have called him ridiculous and called his fucking shrink for him like the hypocrite he was.

He didn’t sleep and he drank until having beer in his belly was the only way he _could_ sleep for more than two hours at a stretch. It was a problem. He knew it was a problem when his hands began to shake. Gideon knew it was a problem every time he had her regenerate his liver to something that wasn’t well on its way to cirrhosis. The others… They may have known it was a problem, but he didn’t know how much they actually cared.

The hallucinations came and he drank even more.

Tried to pretend Len didn’t look sad, because hallucinations didn’t feel emotions.

“You’re going to drink yourself into a grave,” Len said, voice soft in that way it used to get when he knew he’d fucked up and knew presents and a heist couldn’t fix it. Mick hated that voice.

“See ya in hell,” he replied and tipped the beer bottle towards Len.

Len opened his mouth to say something else, but he disappeared between one sip and the next.

Mick didn’t sleep a fucking wink when the Legion came and Len – a _wrong_ Len, because no version of Leonard Snart had ever been that cold to him – came with them. He moved and he drank and he betrayed the team for someone with his husband’s face and none of his heart.

A him that was and wasn’t him got stabbed in the back and Mick woke up feeling cold for weeks.

No one talked about the night his screaming woke the whole ship, dancing around memories of how they’d come charging into his room with weapons raised, just to see him pale, bent over, and panting.

Sara gave him a look that said she understood on some level and shooed the others away while he calmed himself down. She stayed, silent and present, but she never asked what the nightmare had been.

He wasn’t sure he would have told her.

He didn’t think anyone could understand the terror of seeing Chronos remove his armor and have Len staring back.

When Len came back, body broken and mind halfway to shattered by the timestream, Mick found a whole new set of nightmares to keep him awake on the nights he managed to sleep at all. Mostly, he sat with Len, watching and waiting for some sign of the man he knew.

“You need to see Dr. Lu,” Len murmured one night, knees curled up towards his chest as he rocked absently. “Sleep is important.”

Mick hummed, noncommittal, and passed Len an apple slice he’d cut off. “I will when you will.”

“They don’t make shrinks to deal with this.” Len chuckled, something a little unhinged. “Time travel PTSD. I bet Barry knows a guy.”

Barry did, in fact, know a guy.

Mick did not want to know why or how Barry met him.

But… It helped. They went home and they went to therapy. Len slowly became another version of Len the way Mick had become another version of himself after Chronos. And Mick… The nightmares still came sometimes, but he learned to sleep again.

The End


End file.
